In the early 1960s, when Norman Francis and his son Michael were out for a drive, the youngster was dazzled when he saw the Martin Cinerama Theater being built on Tulane Avenue.

"Are we going to be able to go to see a movie in it?" Michael asked.

Not wishing to tell the ugly truth -- most New Orleans movie theaters were off-limits to black patrons then -- Francis, then Xavier University's dean of men, fudged: "You've got to have an invitation," he told his son.

In the summer of 1964, when Congress passed what would become the Civil Rights Act, Francis called his wife and said, "Tell Michael we just got our invitation."

The bill, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law July 2, 1964, swept away laws that had barred black people from public places such as parks, restaurants, buses -- and movie theaters. Theaters that did admit black patrons had relegated them upstairs, to the so-called "colored balcony."

The bill's becoming law represented a seismic shift in society, especially in the South, where racial separation had been the rule, but the changes wrought by the act were neither immediate nor pervasive. In fact, Francis said, some delegates to the Urban League's national convention in New Orleans in 1969 -- the group's first such meeting south of the Mason-Dixon Line -- were refused service at a bar across the street from the Fairmont (now Roosevelt) Hotel, where the meeting was held.

In this July 2, 1964, file photo, President Lyndon B. Johnson reaches to shake hands with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after presenting the civil rights leader with one of the 72 pens used to sign the Civil Rights Act in Washington. Surrounding the president, from left, are, Rep. Roland Libonati, D-Ill., Rep. Peter Rodino, D-N.J., Rev. King, Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y., and behind Celler is Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League. AP

Nevertheless, the act made a difference, said Francis, a lawyer, who has been Xavier's president since 1968.

"It gave those who had been denied all these years the feeling that there was hope for the country," he said, "because you had leadership in the country that was willing to take not just a chance but to understand that if you don't do this now, you'll regret it. ...

"Did it solve all the problems? Not at all. But I think it reaffirmed the meaning of the Constitution and the law of the land."

After that, black citizens across the South had drawn attention to the inequalities they had been enduring by staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, risking their lives as Freedom Riders on interstate buses, picketing stores that refused to serve African-Americans and peacefully defying laws relegating black people to the back of city buses.

In New Orleans, black leaders of local affiliates of civil rights organizations such as the Urban League and the Congress of Racial Equality, better known as CORE, worked with influential white citizens such as Rosa Keller and Harry Kelleher, who used their vast networks to get jobs for local African-Americans who had been overlooked or denied by white employers.

"I had access," Keller said in a 1983 interview. "I could open the doors."

Getting through those doors may have been just as important as the legislation, said Oretha Castle Haley, a local CORE leader, in an oral-history interview on file at the Amistad Research Center on the Tulane University campus.

This type of advancement, Haley said, represented a "transformation which occurred among African-Americans and their ability to see themselves as part of the essential fabric of America."

President John F. Kennedy announced plans for civil rights legislation in a nationwide television address in June 1963. Two months later, it was followed by the March on Washington, which drew between 250,000 and 300,000 people to the National Mall, where they heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s epic "I Have a Dream" speech.

Despite that dramatic launch, the legislation went nowhere on Capitol Hill because the Kennedy administration was reluctant to alienate Southern Democrats who controlled Congress and were united in their opposition to the bill, Adam Fairclough wrote in "Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972."

"The problem," he wrote, "was not so much lack of evidence to convict the South as it was lack of political will to put the South in the dock and render a verdict."

It was of a piece with the administration's attitude when demonstrators were jailed or beaten, as they were in Plaquemine in 1963, Fairclough wrote.

"The Kennedy administration had usually turned the other way, disclaiming any legal grounds for action," he wrote. "With no formal mechanism for intervention, the government relied upon persuasion and informal mediation when confronted with Southern racial crises, employing coercion only if whites brazenly flouted important federal court orders. In general, it had followed a policy of the least possible intervention."

That changed with Kennedy's assassination in November. With Johnson in the White House, Fairclough wrote, the federal government "initiated rather than merely reacted."

Johnson was not only a Southerner but also a master politician who, because of his experience as Senate majority leader, knew how to twist arms and make coalitions to get legislation passed. Working with leaders of both parties, he maneuvered the bill through Congress despite strong Southern opposition, including every member of Louisiana's congressional delegation.

Opposition was fierce, as the files of letters to U.S. Rep. Hale Boggs, D-New Orleans, show.

The Louisiana State Bar Association's House of Delegates, the organization's policy-making body, sent Boggs a copy of its resolution denouncing the bill as a "violation of the rights to liberty, property and due process of law." An editorial in The State Times, Baton Rouge's afternoon newspaper, said it would "thrust deeply into the private lives of Americans everywhere."

An anonymous writer said the bill was "clearly a tyrannical attempt to restore monarchy or establish dictatorship," while another writer warned Boggs, "Don't forget the white people elected you." A flier from E.M. Ruiz proclaimed, "Segregation is the law of God."

Opposition continued even after Johnson signed the bill into law. Invoking one of the more hated images of Reconstruction, U.S. Rep. Howard W. Smith, D-Va., predicted the act would trigger "a second invasion of carpetbaggers."

Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson said he didn't think residents of his state had to obey the law until after it had been tested in court, and he said many Mississippians would prefer to go out of business rather than comply with it.

Mississippi theater owners announced an emergency meeting to discuss the new law's implications.

In New Orleans, City Attorney Alvin J. Liska tied himself in knots trying to explain the law's local implications.

For instance, he said, the fact that the law was a federal statute meant that black people with complaints against police should go to federal court, not state court.

The law's federal status also would determine whether all restaurants would have to serve everyone who came through the door, he said. "Desegregation applies when a substantial portion of the food served comes from outside of Louisiana."

When asked about the law's impact on restaurants serving Louisiana seafood, Liska said: "They might be exempt, but a lot depends on that key word 'substantial.' How the federal court will interpret 'substantial' is another thing."

For the law to be effective, "the operation must affect interstate commerce," he said.

New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel joined Louisiana's other Catholic bishops in a statement urging people to comply with the law.

"Loyal compliance with the law is clearly the duty of all citizens," they wrote. "It is also our one hope for preserving harmony in our community and tranquility in our homes -- surely one of man's most basic needs and aspirations.

"We, therefore, turn with confidence to our fellow citizens of Louisiana and ask them to put aside hatred, agitation, repression and any other extremes and, instead of these evils, to embrace charity, understanding and loyal obedience to the laws of the country."

In discussing the law, Francis, 83, cited his experience as an African-Ameican man. When he returned home to New Orleans in 1957 after serving two years in Germany with the Army, he couldn't get into most restaurants or theaters, and he and his family couldn't go to City Park or Audubon Park.

"Some of us kept our heads straight and worked for change," said Francis, who worked in the law firm that represented CORE and housed Freedom Riders in Xavier dormitories after their buses were bombed.

"The Civil Rights Act was a big sign that things can be better," he said. It wasn't a magic bullet, but it was enough of a shot across the bow that the country was going to see people like they should be (seen) under the Constitution."